New Books in Religion

In The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Indiana University Press, 2013), Mel Scult, professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, explores the ways in which Mordecai Kaplan, the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America, was a radical. Using Kaplan’s 27-volume diary, Scult places Kaplan’s thought in conversation with other thinkers like Spinoza, Emerson, Ahad Ha-Am, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lynn Davidman, Robert M. Beren Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas, utilizes interviews with more than forty individuals who have left their Hasidic communities to vividly document the ways in which these men and women grapple with questions of faith, ritual, and communal authority. In addition to sharing her subjects’ journeys to find themselves and a place within the broader world, Davidman recounts her own experience in leaving Orthodoxy behind as a young adult, and highlights the challenges of testing the boundaries of individuality, community, and gendered expectations of behavior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

As the title of the monograph suggests, Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) by Asma Afsaruddin, guides the reader through an organized and compelling narrative of reflections on hot-button topics in the modern world. The monograph offers a provocative balance of historical contextualization, close reading of texts, review of key scholars, and political analysis. Given its treatment of topics such as Islamic law, gender, international relations, and interfaith dialogue, the book should prove useful in a graduate or undergraduate context–either as a whole or as individual chapters–particularly as a conversation starter, given the depths to which each chapter points. Although the scope of the book may appear ambitious, Professor Afsaruddin is well-equipped to manage the breadth of her study into a concise, lucid, and well written text. Given her research background in jihad and violence as well as Quranic hermeneutics, moreover, Contemporary Issues in Islam is a mature work that reflects decades of careful research and intellectual synthesis with ample attention to both primary and secondary literature. The monograph will likely appeal not only to scholars and students in religious studies and Islamic studies, but also political science and history as well as journalists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition (Yale University Press, 2013), Gary A. Anderson, Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Notre Dame, explores the theological underpinnings of alms-giving, or charity. Anderson looks back to the Bible and post-biblical texts to show how, contrary to our modern view, a belief in a heavenly treasury was not just about self-interest, but is an expression of faith in god. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Anthropologist Birgit Meyer‘s most recent book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), explores the dynamic process of popular video filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination that interweaves technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Pentecostal Christianity on the other. More specifically, Sensational Movies shows the affinity between cinematic and Christian modes of looking and showcases the transgressive potential haunting figurations of the occult. In this in depth account, more than two decades in the making, Meyer takes us into the nexus of imagination, imaginaries, and images in contemporary Ghana. Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Although there are many deep criticisms of a scientific view of humanity and the world, a persistent theme is that the scientific worldview eliminates mystery, and in particular, the wonders and mysteries of the world’s religions. In Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World (Columbia University Press), Eric Dietrich argues that the human thirst for mystery would still be slated even if we explain away the mysteries of religion in scientific, specifically evolutionary, terms. Among the strange “excellent beauties”, he claims, are consciousness and infinity. Dietrich, professor of philosophy at Binghamton University, describes the structure of spiritual journeys, the social-bonding role of religious belief and our ineliminably “Janus-faced” nature as creatures who dislike open-ended mysteries but love magical thinking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Despite remaining neutral on his personal religious beliefs, Freud’s commitment to empiricism and his determination in relegating psychoanalysis to a scientifically valid position has had a lasting impact. In some sense, its created a taboo against theological considerations. This taboo, Earl Bland and Brad Strawn, the editors of Christianity and Psychoanalysis: A New Conversation (IntraVarsity Press, 2014) argue, has been to the detriment of psychoanalysis as a clinical form of treatment and a philosophical system of meaning. Like religion, psychoanalysis attempts to ask what it means to live in the face of death. Psychoanalysis, in its traditions as vast and nuanced as those within the Christian faith, like religion, has moral imperatives about how subjectivity ought to be structured. Bland and Strawn observe that the culture is ripe for a new conversation, in that the turn toward rationalitywithin Christianity can be understood as a philosophical parallel to the turn in psychoanalytic theory toward understanding the human subject as being in relationship. To initiate this conversation, they have gathered a group of practitioners and people of faith from across the spectrum, to engage in this exchange: one that breaks the taboo that has prevented these two domains of knowledge from sharing the same conversational space. Speaking from perspectives across both disciplines, this book features authors ranging from contemporary Freudian psychoanalysis to Attachment-Based psychoanalytic therapy on the psychoanalytic spectrum and from traditional Catholicism to faiths rooted in the Charismatic tradition across the Christian spectrum. In each chapter, the authors mutually invoke a theoretical consideration together with a clinical demonstration. Their voices are informed, critical, and personal in equal measure. Together with the editors, they candidly and humbly demonstrate not just the value of, but also the necessity of, acknowledging the dialogical influence of religious beliefs in the clinical setting, both on the side of the patient, as someone who may organize his or her subjectivity in relationship to faith, as well as on the side of the clinician, whose religious beliefs may consciously or unconsciously mediate the treatment. Claire-Madeline’s interests lie at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Catholic theology, which are often at the fore of her discussions with the authors she is privileged to interview for the New Books Network. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and holds a BA in Psychology from Eugene Lang College, The New School for liberal arts.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ever wonder what Kabbalah is really about? Or how you might have a close relationship with God? Is cleaving to God an expectation that might have been medieval but no longer is sought? Rabbi Dr. Daniel M. Horwitz ‘s new book A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016) answers these questions and many more in an easily readable, even entertaining, highly authentic and scholarly manner. Divided into seven parts and twenty-eight concise chapters, with each chapter an ideal length to readily understand the topic, this book is perfect for the student of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism as well as the casual reader eager to transform his/her spiritual options. Praised by critics as “a gateway into the world of Jewish spirituality . . . An important resource, very well done” and “carefully thought out and well researched, making a very complicated subject quite accessible,” Daniel Horwitz’s new book describes five major types of Jewish mysticism and includes a brief chronology of its development, with a timeline. Beginning with the Bible’s prophets, he moves through early mystical movements up through current expressions of Deveikut, or cleaving to God. Kabbalah and the ten sephirot are described and explained. The words and teachings about mysticism and exaltation of twentieth century giant Abraham Joshua Heschel are shared. Humor is part of the telling of stories by Horwitz, and clarity and understanding emerge. In fact, the book is like a private class or conversation with this compassionate, brilliant teacher: he sits across from you as you read a vital text and then he explains to you what it means and the context in which you want to understand it. The book has received very favorable reviews. Among them, see here. A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader is available via Amazon.com, Jewish Publication Society, and your independent bookseller Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his path clearing new book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, presents a fascinating account of how conversion from Islam to Christianity was imagined, debated, and contested in early modern Spain. Shifting focus from the experiences of converts to intellectual discussions and disputes on matters such as coercion and assimilation, Kimmel demonstrates that such discussions were intimately tied to not only questions of religious reform but also to the demarcation of varied scholarly disciplines within Christianity. It is this nexus of knowledge, religious reform, and conversion that this book brilliantly explores and uncovers. Questioning binaries such as tolerance/intolerance and religious/secular, Kimmel highlights the complex material, intellectual, and political conditions and considerations that informed scholarly engagements with the questions and puzzles of religious conversion in early Modern Spain. In our conversation, we talked about the major themes and arguments of the book and its striking relevance to discourses on religious tolerance in the present. Parables of Coercion is at once beautifully written and unusually multilayered for a first book. It will also make an excellent choice for courses on Muslim-Christian relations, early modern religion, religious conversion, secularism, and Islamic Spain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015), Marc B. Shapiro, the Weinberg Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton, explores how segments of the Orthodox Jewish world rewrite the past by editing or erasing that which does not fit in with their contemporary world-view.  He surveys a variety of types of censorship, including the censoring of Jewish thought, Halakhah (Jewish law), and sexual matter.  The book asks us to reconsider the value of the concept of “truth” in Orthodox Judaism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion